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Final Dispatch: End in Pizza
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘Those are not prisons, they are condominiums for rich people. Or at least that is what rich people think.’
Adam Thirlwell on Michel Laub
Michel Laub & Adam Thirlwell
‘The thing I really love about this story is how it manages its matryoshka feat – to be at once a free floating meditation, leaping like some street cat from wall to wall, while also going deeper and deeper into a single theme.’
Introducing Javier Arancibia Contreras
Andrés Barba
‘In this story, the troubled translator’s only interlocutor is, of course, a rat with human vices and traits.’
Brazil: A User’s Guide
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘The Brazilian banking system was created by a Czech writer called Franz Kafka.’
Kevin Brockmeier on Leandro Sarmatz
Leandro Sarmatz & Kevin Brockmeier
Kevin Brockmeier introduces Granta Best of Young Brazilian Novelist Leandro Sarmatz.
Rachel Seiffert on Vanessa Barbara
Rachel Seiffert & Vanessa Barbara
‘A story that starts with a bereavement: already I’m drawn in.’
Second Dispatches from Ambassador to Brazil, Earth
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘Forget about football: queuing and stamping are Brazil’s national sports.’
Anecdotes
Ann Beattie
‘Christine’s hair had begun to dry, and she looked different, with her hair down and her glasses on. Her earnestness made her look younger, and took me back to the bar where we’d sat in Pennsylvania years ago.’
Introducing Tatiana Salem Levy
A.L. Kennedy
Tatiana Salem Levy is introduced by previous double Best of Young British Novelist, A.L. Kennedy.
Dispatches from Ambassador to Brazil, Earth
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘In Brazil it is crucial not to be Argentinian. Add that to our Earth mission’s proceedings manual under the topic ‘Cultural Affairs’.’
Deborah Levy | Podcast
Deborah Levy & Ted Hodgkinson
Here Deborah Levy spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why as she wants to resist anything resembling a comfort zone and why writing fiction is about ‘finding reasons to live’.
Brad Feuerhelm | Podcast
Brad Feuerhelm & Ted Hodgkinson
Brad Feuerhelm spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about the stories that lie behind his images from the issue and how his work is informed by his love of horror movies.
Alison Moore | Podcast
Alison Moore & John Freeman
Alison Moore spoke to John Freeman about the experience of being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, why her characters often find themselves enclosed in a memory and writing short.
Hilary Mantel Wins Second Booker Prize
Anne Meadows
In 2009 Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize for her extraordinary novel Wolf Hall....
Jeet Thayil | Podcast
Jeet Thayil & Ted Hodgkinson
Jeet Thayil talked to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about being shortlisted for the Booker, the images of Christ woven into his novel Narcopolis and an unexpected digression on Blade Runner.
The Island of Hawkers
Tan Twan Eng
‘Suspecting (rightly) that you have been eating diluted, unauthentic versions of the real thing, you realize you have to go to Penang, the best place to eat street food in Malaysia.’
Mo Yan | Interview
Mo Yan & John Freeman
‘My life is more current, more contemporary and the cutting throat cruelty of our contemporary times limits the romance that I once felt.’
Victor LaValle | Interview
Victor LaValle & John Freeman
‘Our battle is between those trapped inside the institutions of modern American life (our economic and political systems in particular) and those who manipulate such institutions for their own profit.’
Grand Mal
Patrick Ryan
‘And this is what very few novels or movies have ever gotten right about amnesia: it’s not exotic; it’s horrific and sad-making. I was sad because I had no story.’
D.T. Max | Podcast
D.T. Max
D.T. Max on about why ‘David always wanted to be one David’, the solace he found in twelve-step programmes and what his use of wiper-fluid, on a car ride with Jonathan Franzen, reveals about his prose style.
The Wig
Han Dong
‘Hu Yanjun had got his hands on a wig, and was trying it on in front of the mirror when his friend Wang Xinghai came to see him.’
Han Dong | Interview
Han Dong & Philip Hand
‘Inflaming readers isn’t a good thing; I want to entice them.’
Religion Against Humanity
Wole Soyinka
‘The world should not continue to acquiesce in the brutal culture of extremism that demands the impossible.’
The Metaphoreign Body
Tod Wodicka
‘Finally, I was reduced to a piece of matter, solid and real and mute and totally absorbed inside a foreign system.’
Salman Rushdie | Interview
Salman Rushdie & John Freeman
‘I'm not quite the same person as the ‘me’ about whom the book is written.’
A Dose of Winter Medicine
Kseniya Melnik
‘I looked at the carpet in her small living room. This is where she had fallen and lay for twenty-four hours before her younger sister, Auntie Tanya, had found her.’
Meeting the psychiatrist’s wife
Lorraine Mariner
‘The psychiatrist’s wife / has a dress the colour / of that bottle of claret / you shouldn’t have drunk / last night.’
Shackleton’s Medical Kit
Gavin Francis
‘Each box was like the distillation of all that we have learned as a species about our bodies and their infirmities, a time capsule of medicine at the start of the twenty-first century.’
Anthony Shadid
Cecil Hourani
‘Anthony’s life was a triumph and a tragedy. It was a tragedy which I believe he foresaw.’
Accident
Etgar Keret
’Thirty years I’m a cabbie,’ the small guy sitting behind the wheel tells me, ’thirty years and not one accident.’
